By doubling down in placing equal blame for the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va., Trump gave presidential cover to white nationalists and supremacists, even as he gave lip-service condemnation to its most extreme members, like those dreadfully misguided souls in the neo-Nazi movement and the Ku Klux Klan. When former KKK leader David Duke is thrilled, the situation on the ground has become perilous indeed.

Trump appeared dangerously unstable in his 17-minute jeremiad in the gilded lobby of Trump Tower. Whether he can appreciate this fact is highly questionable, but Trump now presents a moral dilemma for those serving in his cabinet: Should they stay or exit in righteous protest? Worse, whatever the men and women trying to serve the nation decide to do, it’s difficult to imagine how Trump’s broken administration manages to perform as anything other than a lame-duck, minding-the-store apparatus. His actions and words have alienated a broad spectrum of Republican lawmakers and intellectuals.

We cringe at what our foes will attempt, faced with such a palsied leader unable even to articulate — much less stand for — founding American principles of democracy.

Trump, who has proven countless times that he cannot be trusted, argued vociferously that his earlier waffling sprang from a desire to get the facts and set the record straight that bad actors on the left were equally responsible for the bloodshed.

The left certainly has some troublemakers in its ranks, but let’s consider Trump’s ludicrous charge with a couple of contemporary examples familiar to Coloradans. As we learned from extensive coverage of the legion of protesters who gathered for the 2008 Democratic and Republican political conventions in, respectively, Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul, the mostly peaceful demonstrations were too often disrupted by ideologically confused vandals intent on destruction of private property and other illegal acts. Many of the same bad actors appeared at both conventions. Similarly, the Occupy movement was too often disrupted by bad actors and incoherence.

Yes, acts of violence and destruction are clearly worthy of condemnation.

But Trump’s decision to vent fire-and-fury anger at people who amassed to oppose hatred and bigotry is breathtakingly abhorrent. Especially when a nation mourns the death of a peaceful young woman among them who was run down by a neo-Nazi sympathizer enthralled by the supremacists’ call.

Also abhorrent: Trump’s decision to equate Confederate generals with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who, despite their faults, fought and worked to form a more perfect union where all men and women are to be accepted as equals.

Now the likes of Duke are emboldened. They gleefully promise to keep the demonstrations coming in Charlottesville and across the country.

Trump took sides Tuesday, and he took the wrong one.

We hope Americans can dig deeper and find peaceful and productive ways to blunt this vile hatred. What we’re living in now isn’t representative of what’s best about us, whatever the unhinged man in the White House says.

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